Tracing Roots: A Journey With a Genealogy Expert

[Kevin Spire, Professional Genealogist and Iowa Genealogical Society Volunteer] So it might be very appealing to jump some branches on the family tree and look for that connection to George Washington, or to King of England or whoever might be hidden in your family tree.

I always tell people that you want to start your research with what you know best, and that's usually yourself, and make sure you've got a connection going back in time to that other area.

Record information about yourself and then your parents and your siblings. You might take a little side trip and go down your tree. And if you have a spouse, get some information about them and your children and maybe your grandchildren.

Once you've got that foundation built, then start going up the tree from your parents out to their siblings, which are your parents and uncles and then grandparents and so on and so forth. And eventually you can make sure you've got the right connection to that George Washington story or that King of England.

There was a ge..in like the 1800s or something that would do research for people and did some rather sketchy research because he wanted to make those his clients happy with some of those connections. And people today still do it too, right?

They want their connection to, Steven Spielberg or to Tom Hanks or whoever or whoever it is, whatever celebrity is out there, and it's no different from ages ago.

And take into assessment what you might already have.

So maybe you have photo albums, maybe a, aunt or uncle has something in their attic or their basement.

That might be helpful, especially talking to living relatives that are still around and and picking their memories for some of those tidbits.

It's it's good to get that while they're still around..to be able to share that with you.

And if they're comfortable with you recording it, absolutely record it.

You'll be glad you did when they're no longer with us.

[Kevin Spire, Professional Genealogist and Iowa Genealogical Society Volunteer] And some say genealogy. Some say genealogy is kind of a tomato. Tomato to me anyways, it is.

When I was an early teenager, I had a love of photography and I was probably 11 or 12 years old or so, and I had one of those, box cameras that you look down into, you know, and you crank the film on it. And, I took a lot of pictures with those. And then I got my first Kodak Instamatic with the Magic Cube on top, right? And I was entering photos into fairs and 4-H, county fairs and that type of thing. And as time went on, I started, accumulating old photos from other family members. Wedding photos, family pictures, snapshots, studio photos on the cabinet cards, that type of thing.

And when I finally had my first house, I had a lot of these frames sitting on the mantel, and I'd look at them and I'd study really close at them and look at, you know, What are they wearing? How was their hair styled? What kind of jewelry were they're wearing? What was in the background to try and identify them.

And once I went through all that, then I started looking closer into their eyes, and I just felt a real connection with them to think about what brought these people to this point and this time in their life. When this photo was taken, some of them were, wedding photos. Some of them were just snapshots in the backyard, that type of thing. But it really made me curious to know more about the man or the woman that was in the photo and what brought them to that place in that time.

And about a year ago, I was researching my grandparents, my paternal grandparents. So that would be my father's parents. And I didn't realize this, but I found out that they had eloped. And, there was a newspaper article that said that, they lived in the Tama/Toledo area and they had eloped to Waterloo. And then they came back home and they didn't tell anyone for two months, including their own parents.

Another discovery I had was, about an ancestor, my great great great grandfather. His name was Christopher Harding Spire, and he came from England to the United States. And, I was researching about him and his life and in southwestern England and I finally found his baptismal record, and he was born in 1824. And this little village called, Laverton. And in there it identified him and his mother, Sarah Harding. And the child status said illegitimate. I thought, "Oh, I didn't realize that." So then I looked a little closer at, well, when was his mother and Mr. Spire married? Well, it was about 18 months later, after his birth. Now, it could be that they are truly the biological parents. And they just waited a year and a half to get married. It's a little unusual to wait quite that long. So this is still another mystery. I'm trying to unravel of who is the biological father of Christopher Harding Spire. Because he didn't assume that Spier surname, my surname, until later in life.

[Kevin Spire, Professional Genealogist and Iowa Genealogical Society Volunteer] Historically, it's always been that this has been an activity for retired and senior people, right? This is what they do when they get older.

But since so much has opened up on the internet, now things have opened up and we have companies that promote the information like Ancestry and Family Search and 23 and Me and these big companies that promote that information.

And then we have the DNA testing that's come in, and that brings more of more interest and more tech savvy people coming into the arena.

So you end up seeing a real cross-section of people that are becoming more interested and more involved in doing genealogy research.

Another really good resource, though, and I have to put in a little plug for our genealogical and historical societies, those people that work at those places and volunteer at those places, they have experience and can help you out. They can give you tips, tricks, angles to look at things you might not have considered in the past. And, they're a friendly group of people that are willing to help if you just reach out and connect with them.

When people think about genealogy research, they think about the book work and the research and the studying and all those source citations that are, you know, as long as your arm. Yes, it can be that. And that's great to have that type of information. But not everybody wants to consume the information that way.

I've helped families put together a couple of cookbooks and they collect family recipes, and then in there we insert some some charts and some old photos and that type of thing to give some family history relevance to it.

I've helped people organize scrapbooks and picture books, of course. There's also some other gift ideas where you can, maybe have a little cameo pictures of different family members. And then, they had a wall sculpture of a tree that they hung these little cameo pictures on there. Some people want it in the form of maybe a short story, or maybe it might be,

I've heard of a person in their Christmas card or their holiday card, putting a little something at the bottom. "Did you know Uncle Alvin was in the Marines? Let me know if you want to know more."

So, of course, there's oodles of stuff on the internet, right? And I use Google a lot, to find things on the internet. But of course, not everything is digitized and not everything is on the internet.

You know, like I was saying, there could be those items that are locked up in someone's attic or in their basement or something like that.

There might be things at a county courthouse that could help you with your research, and they don't have any money to do the digitization. So you have to go and do the, boots on ground work. The same is true with church records, land records, that sort of thing.

There are also a number of archival holdings around the United States and private libraries that have things that are available for the public to view, but you have to be there in person to look at.

I was last year  in Virginia, in Richmond, Virginia, doing some research, and we went to a private library where they had letters written by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. You know, that I could pull out and look at and and read.

Sometimes there's some data in those letters that might, make reference to a friend or another family member to help you make your connections.

Of course, that gets a little bit more for the more advanced researcher who wants to pursue that type of thing. It really comes down to a lot to, how can you find the information that you collect?

How can you share it in a way that's consumable to others so that they will benefit from it also. Because it really does help a person identify not only where they came from, but how they got to the place that they are today, and can even give some perspective of where they're going to go tomorrow.